The “background” description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description which may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly or impliedly admitted as prior art against the present invention.
Third and fourth generation mobile telecommunication systems, such as those based on the 3GPP defined UMTS and Long Term Evolution (LTE) architecture are able to support more sophisticated services than simple voice and messaging services offered by previous generations of mobile telecommunication systems. For example, with the improved radio interface and enhanced data rates provided by LTE systems, a user is able to enjoy high data rate applications such as mobile video streaming and mobile video conferencing that would previously only have been available via a fixed line data connection. The demand to deploy third and fourth generation networks is therefore strong and the coverage area of these networks, i.e. geographic locations where access to the networks is possible, is expected to increase rapidly.
There is also a demand to make further improvements in the efficiency with which data is communicated in future wireless communications networks. A wireless access interface provided by such future wireless communications networks may also use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM).
OFDM is a well-established technique which can be generally described as providing K narrow band sub-carriers (where K is an integer) which are modulated in parallel, each sub-carrier communicating a modulated data symbol such as for example Quadrature Amplitude Modulated (QAM) symbol or Quaternary Phase-shift Keying (QPSK) symbol. The modulation of the sub-carriers is formed in the frequency domain and transformed into the time domain for transmission. Since the data symbols are communicated in parallel on the sub-carriers, the same modulated symbols may be communicated on each sub-carrier for an extended period. The sub-carriers are modulated in parallel contemporaneously, so that in combination the modulated carriers form an OFDM symbol. The OFDM symbol therefore comprises a plurality of sub-carriers each of which has been modulated contemporaneously with different modulation symbols, which form modulation cells on the sub-carriers of the OFDM symbols.
Our co-pending International patent application PCT/GB2015/053440 discloses a transmitter and a receiver suitable for application in transmitting and receiving signals via a wireless access interface according to an LTE standard. According to the disclosure an I/Q interleaver is arranged maximally to separate the I and Q components of the modulation symbols in the resource element domain.